Can You Afford to Bet on Bitcoin?

The highflying cryptocurrency is a scary proposition best left to the well-heeled.

By

Michael Kahn

Nov. 29, 2017 3:44 p.m. ET

By

Michael Kahn

Nov. 29, 2017 3:44 p.m. ET

I didn’t want to address the parabolic rise in the price of Bitcoin, as it’s very difficult to apply reasonable technical analysis to something moving this quickly. Because of that, I can’t come to a conclusion on where this market might move next. But in either direction, the cryptocurrency seems to offer huge rewards, but with risks not seen in a long, long time.

Pundits now use the “B word”—bubble—to describe a market that gained nearly 1,000% this year. The problem with a bubble is that we really can’t know when we are...